THE specific talent necessary to the expression of local life is much rarer than the ability to write of life in the abstract. If the knack of writing accompanied a sensibility to the life that lay nearest, we should long ago have had an abundant American literature descriptive of conditions that have passed and will not, in the very nature of things, recur. But the line of impressionability may not be controlled; and though many protests have been launched against minor American poets for looking beyond the robin to the nightingale, the rejection of the near continues, though in a diminishing degree. The early poets of the Ohio Valley did not often approach closely to the Western soil; they lacked insight and courage and their work was usually not interesting. When they occasionally essayed a Western subject, they were unable to bring to bear upon it any novelty of treatment; it was all “icily regular, splendidly null.” William T. Coggeshall states in the preface to his “Poets and Poetry of the West” (1864) that in the early years of the nineteenth century “soldiers, hunters, and boatmen had among them many songs descriptive of adventures incident to backwoods life, some of which were not destitute of poetic merit; but they were known only around campfires, or on ‘broadhorns’” (flat-boats), and tradition, he adds, preserved none worthy to be included in his anthology. But these racy songs would have been of greater value than much of the verse that he has preserved in his pages, though as a part of the history of development this, too, is not to be spurned. Coggeshall’s work includes notices of ninety-seven men and fifty-five women. Twenty-three of the total he attributes to Indiana by reason of residence, and thirteen of the number were natives of the State. Only a small proportion of the poets named by Coggeshall survived, though the writers of the biographical notes accompanying his selections were cordial and anxious to confer immortality. William D. Howells and John J. Piatt are included, and Mr. Howells wrote several of the sketches. It is diverting to read the opinion of Mr. Howells’s biographer that “some of his prose sketches are quite equal in grace of conception and individuality of treatment to any of his poems.” He was then twenty-seven.
Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, were early rivals for literary prominence at the West: one was the seat of Cincinnati College, the other of Transylvania University. Many books were published at Lexington before 1825, and The Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, which appeared there in 1803, is believed to have been the first magazine published west of the Alleghanies. Hunt’s Western Review, which was formerly regarded as the pioneer, dated from 1819, and was also a Lexington publication. Lexington dropped out, and Louisville fell into place as a defender of the literary faith with the advent of George D. Prentice, who became the ardent champion of the muses in the Ohio Valley. The headquarters of poets for this region was the office of the Louisville Journal during Prentice’s reign, and all of the Coggeshall poets laid the tribute of their song before him. To paraphrase Bishop Butler’s remark about the strawberry, quoted by Walton, doubtless Prentice might have declined a poem or discouraged a poet, but doubtless he never did. He was not an exacting critic, and he encouraged many who were without talent; but he took away the reproach of the neglected and unappreciated, and now and then he found a few grains in the chaff to pay him for his trouble.
The Literary Gazette, which appeared at Cincinnati in 1824, with the motto “Not to display learning, but to excite a taste for it,” numbered Mrs. Julia L. Dumont, of Vevay, among its contributors; and she was the first Indiana writer to become identified with the group of aspirants that now began to appear along the Ohio. The prospectus of another Western Review, published at Cincinnati for three years from May, 1827, declared that “we are a scribbling and forthputting people. Little as they have dreamed of the fact in the Atlantic country, we have our thousand orators and poets.” However this may have been, “the Atlantic country” invaded the Ohio Valley in 1835, when the Western Messenger was begun at Cincinnati, under the auspices of the Western Unitarian Association. It was edited first by the Rev. Ephraim Peabody, and later, at Louisville, by James Freeman Clarke. Clarke left Louisville in 1840, and the Messenger was continued at Cincinnati by the Rev. W. H. Channing. John B. Dillon represented Indiana in its table of contents, and found himself in good company, with Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, and C. P. Cranch. The periodical was, as Venable calls it, “an exotic—a Boston flower blooming on the Ohio,” and it ceased to appear in 1841. In the same year, the Ladies’ Repository made its appearance at Cincinnati, under Methodist auspices, and was published continuously for thirty-six years. Mrs. Dumont, Mrs. Sarah T. Bolton, Miss Mary Louise Chitwood, Mrs. Rebecca S. Nichols, Mrs. A. L. Ruter Dufour, Horace P. Biddle, and Isaac H. Julian were the principal Indiana contributors. The number of Indiana writers increased steadily, and the Genius of the West, a Cincinnati magazine dating from 1855, extended the list to include the names of Benjamin S. Parker, John B. Dillon, and Louise E. Vickroy. Peter Fishe Reed, also a contributor to the Genius of the West and similar magazines of the period, combined farming with literary experiments near Mount Vernon (Indiana), and lived for a time at Indianapolis. The majority of these pioneer periodicals lived only a short time, and the Civil War brought a final interruption to most of them; they passed out with the “annuals,” whose literary flavor was similar. Indiana’s ante-bellum writers usually looked to Louisville and Cincinnati for publicity, and no serious effort was made to establish literary magazines within the State.[45] It curiously happened, however, that Emerson Bennett, a voluminous producer of “penny dreadfuls,” published a literary paper called the Casket, at Lawrenceburg (1846), but soon abandoned it. The patient research of Venable discovered the Western Censor, published at Indianapolis in 1823-1824, and The Family Schoolmaster, which had a brief existence at Richmond in 1839. The Querist was conducted by Mrs. Nichols for a few months at Cincinnati in 1844, and Henry Ward Beecher’s Indiana Farmer and Gardener was begun at Indianapolis in 1845, but removed to Cincinnati in the following year. Beecher’s contributions to this paper were the nucleus of his book “A Pleasant Talk about Fruits, Flowers, and Farming.” The Literary Messenger is credited to Versailles, 1854.
Coggeshall included among the Indianians in his anthology William Wallace Harney, who was born (1832) at Bloomington, where his father was a professor in Indiana University; and William Ross Wallace, born (1819) at Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at Bloomington and Hanover colleges; but as the literary life of both began after they had left the State, they may hardly be catalogued as Indiana authors. The Rev. Sidney Dyer, a native of New York State (1814), was for a number of years (1852-1859), a Baptist minister at Indianapolis. He is the author of a number of books, and his writings include many popular songs and poems. Isaac H. Julian, a native of Wayne County (1823), and the brother of George W. Julian, hardly added subsequently to the reputation he had gained prior to the publication of Coggeshall’s book, and the same is true of Granville M. Ballard, who was born in Kentucky (1833), and after his graduation from Asbury University became a resident of Indianapolis, where he is still living. Horace P. Biddle, born in Ohio (1818-1900), removed at an early age to Indiana, where he became prominent in affairs, and held many public offices before his retirement. He aided in the early efforts in behalf of common school education, and was a diligent student and writer. Noble Butler is placed in Kentucky’s list of early writers, though his residence at Hanover gives Indiana a claim upon him. He frequently translated German poetry and wrote original verse occasionally; but the fugitive essays of his nephew, Noble C. Butler, of Indianapolis, are better literature. Coggeshall includes also Jonathan W. Gordon and Henry W. Ellsworth, of Indianapolis, whose contributions to the literature of the period were slight and without distinction. Ellsworth was a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale (1834). Amanda L. Ruter Dufour (1822-1899) and Laura M. Thurston (1812-1842) are properly included among Indiana’s early poets. The latter wrote the lines “On Crossing the Alleghanies” and “The Green Hills of My Fatherland,” which are above the average in the collection and were once much applauded. George W. Cutter, whose “Song of Steam,” beginning,—
“Harness me down with your iron bands;
Be sure of your curb and rein,”—
was once in favor, lived in Indiana, and sat in the General Assembly. He died at Washington in 1865. Rebecca S. Nichols was long associated with the little band of writers who printed verses and tales in Louisville and Cincinnati publications, and her literary instincts were truer than those of most of her contemporaries. She is still living at Indianapolis.
A mournful interest attaches to the work of Mary Louise Chitwood, who was born at Mount Carmel, October 29, 1832, and died there twenty-three years later, sincerely mourned by the whole choir of Western poets. Prentice had encouraged her, and he wrote a memoir to accompany a volume of her verses that appeared in 1857. Her work promised well, though it shared the defects of most of the verse of the day.
Sarah T. Bolton is one of the most interesting figures in Coggeshall, and though born in Kentucky (1820), her long life was spent principally in Indiana. Her husband, Nathaniel Bolton, edited the first newspaper ever published in Indianapolis. Mrs. Bolton began writing at an early age, and through many years it may be said that she stood for poetry in Indiana. Many of her poems are stiff and formal and show little originality; but often her pieces are free and spontaneous, and she had humor, which most of the early poets of the West lacked. Her last volume (1891) is dedicated “To the poets of Indiana, my children after the spirit.” She was known to Willis and Morris, of the Knickerbocker group contemporary with her. Her husband was appointed consul at Geneva in 1855, and she lived for a number of years abroad, finding fresh material for poems in her travels. She died at Indianapolis in 1893. Her best-known poem is “Paddle Your Own Canoe.” She was a loyal Indianian and wrote the lines:—
“The winds of Heaven never fanned,
The circling sunlight never spanned
The borders of a better land
Than our own Indiana.”
Benjamin S. Parker, of all the poets discovered in Indiana by Coggeshall, acquired the greatest skill in versification, and wrote most comprehensively of the pioneer life. He was born on a farm near New Castle (1833), and is one, at least, to whom the phrase “racy of the soil” needs no explanation. He lived in a log cabin, performing the hardest farm labor, and long observation of life at the West made him an authority in matters of customs and dialect. His volume “The Cabin in the Clearing” (1887) contains many poems in which the trials of the earlier settlers are graphically depicted, and it was his right, as one who had aided in the rough work of the pioneers, to urge the new generations to use worthily the opportunities which they inherited. Of the fauna and flora of his own woodlands Mr. Parker became the especial celebrant. The following lines from one of his most graceful pieces are characteristic of his happiest moods:—
“I had a dream of other days,—
In golden luxury waved the wheat;
In tangled greenness shook the maize;
The squirrels ran with nimble feet,
And in and out among the trees
The hangbird darted like a flame;
The cat-bird piped his melodies,
Purloining every warbler’s fame:
And then I heard triumphal song,
’Tis morning and the days are long.”
Mr. Parker felt, more than any other poet of the Ohio Valley, the grandeur of the vast woodlands as the pioneers found them, and he has touched upon it constantly in his writings. He lived for several years in Canada, as a consular officer, and wrote a series of poems under Northern influences; but he has been most fortunate in subjects derived from home experiences. He is a connecting link between the earliest Indiana writers and their successors, and he has been one of the humblest and most devoted and sincere of all the servants of literature in his State.
It is an abrupt transition from these pioneers of poesy to Forceythe Willson, the only Indiana poet who ever came in contact with the New England group. Emerson, in the preface to his “Parnassus” (1874), says, “I have inserted only one of the remarkable poems of Forceythe Willson, a young Wisconsin poet of extraordinary promise, who died very soon after this was written.” The poem chosen was “In State.” This placing of Willson in Wisconsin is, as Piatt says in his eloquent sketch of the poet,[46] rather needless, for he was never connected with Wisconsin in any way. He was born at Genesee Falls, New York, April 10, 1837. In 1846 his father removed to Kentucky, and in 1852 to New Albany. Willson spent about a year at Antioch College, in Ohio, and went afterward to Harvard, but left in his sophomore year, owing to ill health. His home was in Indiana from 1852 to 1864. He wrote his best poems, indeed the greater part of his slender product, at New Albany, and his residence there, in immediate contact with the seat of war, colored his distinctive work. He married, in 1863, Elizabeth Conwell Smith, whom he had met the preceding year at New Albany, and whose literary gifts created a bond of sympathy between them. They removed shortly to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where one of Willson’s brothers was in school. He purchased a house on the Mount Auburn road, near Lowell’s home, with an outlook on the Charles River. James R. Gilmore (Edmund Kirke) was his neighbor and saw much of him at Cambridge. He wrote, in 1895, his recollections, testifying to Willson’s unusual qualities, and giving this description of his personal appearance:—
“Take him, all in all, he was the most lovable man I ever knew; and as a mere specimen of physical manhood he was a joy to look at. A little above the medium height, he was perfectly proportioned and of a sinewy, symmetrical figure. His hair was raven black, wavy, and glossy as satin. His skin was alight olive, slightly tinged with red, and his features were regular, somewhat prominent, and exceedingly flexible, showing an organization of a highly sensitive character. But his eyes were what riveted the observer’s attention. Mr. Longfellow told me they were the finest type of the Oriental, but I never saw eyes—Eastern or Western—to compare with them in luminous power. They were full, large, and dark, with overhanging lashes; but for the life of me I cannot tell their precise color. At times they seemed a deep blue, at other times an intense black, and then they were balls of fire, as he was stirred by some strong emotion. They spoke the ready language of a deep, strong, fiery, yet chastened, nature as it was moved by love, joy, sorrow or indignation.”[47]
Piatt remarks upon his “Oriental look and manner,” and all who knew him were impressed by his distinguished appearance and grave courtesy. In 1858 New Albany became interested in spiritualism. Willson fell under the spell and began a study of the subject. Piatt says that Willson “soon abandoned the professors, but retained until his death a serious spiritual theory or faith of his own. He believed—and he was absolutely honest and sincere, I am sure, in his faith—that the spirits of the dead could, and at times do, have communication with the living.”
Willson seems not to have had an active occupation at any time. His father had been successful in business, and dying at New Albany in 1859, left a comfortable fortune to his children. The poet lived by himself for a number of years, at New Albany, in a small house where he surrounded himself with books and led the life of a student. Louisville is directly across the Ohio from New Albany, and Willson was known to a few of the literary people on the Kentucky side, particularly to Prentice. The approach of the Civil War aroused in him a deep interest in its great issues, and he wrote editorials in support of the Union cause for Prentice’s Journal. He began in the first year of the war, and concluded later, his poem “In State,” which, in spite of its occasional vagueness and its despairing view of the political situation, is written in an effective stanza and is splendidly imaginative. He gloomily assumed that the nation was dead—hence his personification of it as a prone figure lying “in state,” and he brings the rulers of Europe to look upon it,—
“The winds have tied the drifted snow
Around the face and chin; and lo,
The sceptred giants come and go
And shake their shadowy crowns and say: ‘We always feared it would be so!’”
There is hardly a stanza in the poem that does not contain some striking image. It moves on in the mournful cadence of a miserere:—
“The Sisterhood that was so sweet,
The Starry System sphered complete,
Which the mazed Orient used to greet,
The Four and Thirty fallen Stars glimmer and glitter at her feet.”
He published, January 1, 1863, as a carrier’s address in the Louisville Journal, “The Old Sergeant,” which Piatt believed to have been “the transcript of a real history, none of the names in it being fictitious, and the story being reported as exactly as possible from the lips of a Federal assistant surgeon named Austin, with whom Willson was acquainted at New Albany.” The poem appeared anonymously, and for some reason, which was never explained, Willson seemed reluctant at first to admit its authorship. It attracted wide attention. Gilmore relates that early in 1863, in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, he met Dr. Holmes, who held in his hand a copy of the Louisville Journal, containing “The Old Sergeant.” “Read that,” said he, “and tell me if it’s not the finest thing since the war began. Sit down and read it here; you might lose it if I let you take it away.” The ballad is found in “The Old Sergeant and Other Poems” (1867). It is a vivid narrative of sustained power and interest, deriving strength from the earnestness of the recital and the simple language, sometimes descending to army slang, of the soldier. The poem is historically accurate and is a fine celebration of the battle of Shiloh:
“There was where Lew Wallace showed them he was of the canny kin,
There was where old Nelson thundered, and where Rousseau waded in;
There McCook sent ’em to breakfast, and we all began to win—
There was where the grapeshot took me, just as we began to win.
“Now, a shroud of snow and silence over everything was spread;
And but for this old blue mantle and the old hat on my head,
I should not have even doubted, to this moment, I was dead—
For my footsteps were as silent as the snow upon the dead!”
There is a suggestion of Poe, whom Willson greatly admired, in the repetition, with slight variation, of the third line of the stanza; but such points Willson always considered carefully. He was certainly not servilely imitative, and he is an ungenerous critic who would pick flaws in a poem that is so fine as a whole. “The Old Sergeant” is entitled to a place with the best poems of the war—with Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn,” Brownell’s stirring pieces, Will H. Thompson’s “High Tide at Gettysburg,” and Ticknor’s “Little Giffen.” These stand apart from Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” and similar poems, which are civic rather than military. In “The Rhyme of the Master’s Mate,” Willson turned again to the heroic, and while the poem is less artistic than “The Old Sergeant,” it has a swing and a stroke that fit his theme well. His volume contains a number of mystical pieces, colored by his belief in spiritualism, and a few lyrics, as “The Estray” and “Autumn Song,” which have an elusive charm and increase admiration for his talents. Willson was emphatically a masculine character. In literature and in life he liked what he called “muscle,” and he certainly showed a sinewy grasp in his best poems. It is related that once during the war he organized, and armed at his own expense, a home guard to protect New Albany in a dangerous crisis, and at other times he displayed great personal courage. If it had not been for his ill health he would undoubtedly have enlisted.
Willson was not immediately identified at Cambridge as the author of “The Old Sergeant.” As Dr. Holmes said after Willson’s death, “He came among us as softly and silently as a bird drops into his nest,” and it was not like him to call attention to his own performances. After the death of his wife and infant child, October 13, 1864, Willson was often at Gilmore’s house, where he first saw Emerson. Gilmore relates that he returned home one day from Boston to find Lowell lying at full length on a lounge in the library, in animated conversation with Willson. On this occasion an incident occurred illustrative of Willson’s gift of “second sight.” Longfellow was mentioned in the conversation, and Willson remarked that the poet would be there shortly. No one had an intimation of the visit, but Willson described the route that Longfellow was then following toward the house; and when the poet presently arrived, he affirmed the statement of his itinerary as Willson had given it. Willson’s interest in life ended with the death of his wife, whose few poems he published privately. She is remembered at New Albany as a girl of great beauty and refinement.
Willson left Cambridge in the fall of 1866 for New Albany. While there he suffered hemorrhages of the lungs and was ill for a month. He never regained his strength, and his death occurred February 2, 1867, at Alfred, New York. His convictions as to spiritualism grew firmer after his wife’s death, and toward the last, so one of his brothers wrote, “his wife and child seemed to be with him constantly, and he talked to them in a low voice.” He was buried at Laurel, the home of Mrs. Willson’s family, in the White Water Valley. His wife and child lie in one grave beside him. The quiet hilltop cemetery commands a view of one of the loveliest landscapes in Indiana, and it is fitly touched with something of the peace, strength, and beauty that are associated with Willson’s name.
Willson marked the beginning of better things, and a livelier fancy and a keener critical spirit is henceforward observable—in the writings of a veteran like Parker, and in the new company of writers that was forming. The Civil War had profoundly moved the Central States, and Indiana had perhaps felt it more than her neighbors. Willson had lifted his voice for the Union while the war cloud still lay upon the land, and the Thompson brothers spoke for the South from Indiana soil on the arrival of the era of better feeling. Ben D. House, who had served in the Federal armies, wrote with truth and spirit. He ran away from his home in Vermont when he was seventeen, and entered the army from Massachusetts. He saw hard service, and received wounds which were a constant menace for the remainder of his life. He was mustered out finally at Indianapolis, and lived there almost continuously until his death in 1887. His idiosyncrasies and affectations were many, and included the wearing of a great cloak, in which he sombrely wrapped himself in cold weather. His poems were printed privately by his friends in 1892. He had fair luck with the sonnet, and wrote, on the occasion of Grant’s death, “Appomattox,” which follows:—
“To peace-white ashes sunk war’s lurid flame;
The drums had ceased to growl, and died away
The bark of guns, where fronting armies lay,
And for the day the dogs of war were tame,
And resting on the field of blood-fought fame,
For peace at last o’er horrid war held sway
On her won field, a score of years to-day,
Where to her champion forth a white flag came.
O nation’s chief, thine eyes have seen again
A whiter flag come forth to summon thee
Than that pale scarf which gleamed above war’s stain,
To parley o’er the end of its red reign—
The truce of God that sets from battle free
Thy dauntless soul, and thy worn life from pain.”
Lee O. Harris, a native of Pennsylvania (1839), removed to the State in 1852, and was an Indiana soldier in the Civil War. His verse, as collected in “Interludes” (1893), shows little of the military feeling, but is strongly domestic, a forerunner of the work of Mr. Riley, whose teacher Mr. Harris had been at Greenfield.
Dan L. Paine, an Indianapolis journalist (1830-1895), possessed a sound taste, and his occasional pieces were well executed. He wrote an elegy on the death of his friend and fellow-journalist, George C. Harding, which is a meditation on the courage of such spirits:—
“On Freedom’s heights they stand as sentinels,
Brave tropic suns, delve in earth’s deepest caves,
And climb the ladder of the parallels
To sleep in icy graves.”
Such felicities were not uncommon with him. He was the friend and helpful critic of all the younger Indiana writers, and literary reputations have been created from slighter talents than his. His poems were collected privately, under the title “Club Moss” (1890).
So far nearly every name identified with the literary impulse in Indiana has been met south of a line drawn across the State at Crawfordsville; but Evaleen Stein carried it farther north, to Lafayette. Miss Stein’s verse illustrates happily the growing emancipation of the younger generation of Western poets from bare didacticism, and an escape from the landscape of tradition. She finds her subjects in nature, and draws pictures for the pleasure of it, and not with the expectation of tacking a moral to the frame. Earnestness and conviction characterize her verses, and there is often a kind of exultance in the note when she sings of the rough hill pastures or the marshes and bayous that invite her study. She has something of Thoreau’s genius for details, and her volume “One Way to the Woods” (1897) is an accurate calendar of the moods of nature. Her work marks really a new generation, the change of fashion, and the passing of the ante-bellum poets of the region. Twenty years earlier no Ohio Valley poet would have explored a bayou, or could have written of it so musically as Miss Stein:—
“Ah, surely none would ever guess
That through that tangled wilderness,
Through those far forest depths remote,
Lay any smallest path, much less
A way wherein to guide a boat!”
A small volume of the poems of M. Genevieve Todd (1863-1896), of the order of Sisters of Providence, was published after her death. They are wholly devotional, and are marked by elevation of spirit wedded to correct taste. Sister Mary Genevieve was born at Vevay, of Protestant parents, and died at the convent of St. Mary’s of the Woods near Terre Haute. Albion Fellows Bacon, Mrs. D. M. Jordan, Richard Lew Dawson, and William R. Williams have also been creditable contributors to the Hoosier anthology.
Indiana offers, on the whole, a fair field for poets. The prevailing note of the landscape is tranquillity. There is hardly a spot in the State that touches the imagination with a sense of power or grandeur, and yet there are countless scenes of quiet beauty. The Wabash gathers breadth and grace as it flows southward. Long curves here and there give to the eye the illusion of a chain of lakes, and the river’s valley is a rich garden. The Tippecanoe is another beautiful river, famous among fishermen, and there are a number of charming lakes in the northern part of the State. The Kankakee marsh was long haunted by the migrant wild birds, and in recent years a wild goose was found there with the piece of an Eskimo arrow, made of reindeer bone, through its breast. Poets and novelists have found inspiration in the Kankakee. Maurice Thompson and Evaleen Stein have celebrated the region in song; and there is a tradition that the manuscript of “Ben Hur” visited both the Kankakee and Lake Maxinkuckee at certain crises in its preparation. The possibilities of mixed forests are nowhere more happily illustrated than in Indiana, whether in the earliest wistful days of spring or in the full glory of autumn. The beech and the elm, the maple, the hickory and the walnut, and the humbler sassafras and pawpaw are companions of a royal order of forestry, from which the sycamore—the self-constituted guardian of rivers and creeks—is excluded by nature’s decree confirmed by man’s preference. The variety of cereals that may be grown saves the tilled areas from monotony. There are no vast plains of corn or wheat as in Kansas or the Dakotas, but the corn ripens between wheat stubble on one hand, and green pastures or remnants of woodland on the other. The transitional seasons bring more of delight to the senses than the full measure of winter and summer, and have for the observer constant novelty and change. There are qualities in the spring of the Ohio Valley—qualities of sweetness and wistfulness that are peculiar to the region; and when the winds are all from the south, and the winter wheat is brilliant in the fields; when the sap sings beneath the rough bark of the old forest trees, and the young orchards are a blur of pink and white, spirits are abroad there with messages for the sons of men.<